And the terrible elegance of that arrangement, he saw now, was that a family that fears losing money above all else will, sooner or later, do absolutely anything to keep it — will delay the equipment order, will reclassify the warning, will send a lawyer to a pregnant widow’s door — because it has already decided, in advance, that no price is too high to avoid the one outcome it truly dreads.

The fear of losing money is not a neutral thing.

It is the precise mechanism by which decent-seeming people are led, one defensible step at a time, into indefensible places.

Corbin had inherited that fear along with the fortune, and had carried it his whole life as though it were simply prudence, simply seriousness about the world.

And the gift of that whole ruinous season — the lost investors, the collapsed deals, the falling valuation, his mother’s silence — was that it finally forced him to test the fear against reality, and to discover that the catastrophe he had been taught to dread above all things was, when it actually arrived, survivable, ordinary, even clarifying.

The money left, and the sky did not fall.